This Christmas, give yourself the gift of knowing that your work isn’t boring
Photo credit: Juan Gomez via Unsplash
‘Sorry, this is the boring bit.’
When I hear those words, my heart sinks almost as much as it used to when I heard someone declare that they were not technical. In the field of enterprise technology, they normally mean that the speaker is about to attempt an explanation of technical detail to an audience which includes non-technical people.
Perhaps they are going to explain to a product manager why the system built for a hundred users can’t scale to a million without extra infrastructure. Or why it’s not a good idea to put a system which holds customer’s personal details into production without security testing. Or why, while it might be tempting to make the chat interface available to every user, someone has to pay for all those tokens.
My heart doesn’t sink because I am expecting the explanation to be tedious, or inaccessible, or pitched at too low a level of detail (although it may, of course, be any of those things): it is because the speaker undermines their own authority at the outset by saying that this is the boring bit. By declaring their message to be boring, they give the audience permission to be bored: to let their attention wander, to check their phones, and to long for the point where this part of the presentation is over.
I think that there are two reasons not to let your audience off in this way.
First, if you are presenting this sort of detail, then you must want something from your audience, probably some form of decision. Maybe you want more budget for scale, or you want to delay the launch until after the cyber testing, or you want to throttle demand until you have had a chance to monitor and model costs.
When you give permission for boredom, you let your audience abdicate accountability. They may give you what you want: ‘I don’t understand any of this, but I guess I’ve got to go along with it. But next time don’t ambush me with all this gobbledygook!’ Or they may use incomprehension as a veil for unreasonableness; ‘This makes no sense to me! I’ve already given you everything you need - just find a way to make it work!’
Either way, it may seem as if you have been given a decision, and you can either rejoice or grumble about the results. However, what you have really achieved is a submission rather than a decision: the decision maker in such circumstances will rarely feel ownership. And why should they? You told them that this was the boring bit.
The second reason to avoid giving your audience permission to be bored is that what you are talking about is not boring. I have seen technical experts introduce topics as boring when they were fundamental to the success of their organisation: its ability to protect its customers, its ability to give them a reliable service, its ability to maintain cost efficiency and turn a profit. These should all be interesting to business leaders, no matter how they are achieved.
Furthermore, I believe that the means by which technologists achieve these goals are inherently interesting, if we would only let the excitement shine through. The monthly cyber report may look like a spreadsheet of vulnerabilities detected and patched, but it portrays another chapter in a never ending battle against criminals who wish to damage, defraud or destroy the enterprise. The forward plan for cloud capacity might look like a line on a graph, but it represents a marshalling of resources for growth as real as trucks on the road or a new warehouse. And the contract with the LLM provider might look like another piece of paperwork, but it is an agreement to access advanced, experimental technology, the boundary of whose capabilities is unknown.
The work technologists do matters, and we can help people to realise why it matters - but not if we set ourselves up to be boring.
This Christmas, if you get a chance to take a break between the frenzy of this year and the start of next, it’s worth reflecting on whether you have ever introduced your work as the boring bit - and give yourself the gift of confidence and excitement to avoid doing so next year.
